An account of what I study and why, written for anyone curious. The ideas rather than the technical record. The work itself is in the publications.
Any living creature behaves to keep a workable relationship with a world that will not hold still. We are forever adjusting, moment to moment and across a lifetime, to stay in some kind of liveable balance with what surrounds us. Behaviour is how that adjusting gets done. I take this to be a general feature of life rather than a quirk of any single species, and that conviction sets the shape of my work. I am drawn to mechanism at the level where it travels, deep enough to explain and general enough to recur, rather than to the machinery peculiar to one creature. So I look for the same idea wearing different bodies, widening the range of animals I ask it of. A principle this basic, I wager, should show itself most clearly in what recurs across creatures that are otherwise nothing alike.
Frighten a baby fish and it stops eating. Not because it can’t. It still swims, still sees, still burns energy just the same. The urge to feed has simply switched off for a while, and the moment the fright passes hunger comes back. Nothing in the machinery has changed. What changed is the animal’s state. A little stress, I found, makes a fish this young sharper at what it instinctively does, and too much takes the edge away, and it scarcely matters what the stress is, only how much. The animal is re-tuning itself to keep its footing in the world.
A beehive shows the same thing one storey up, as the work of a whole colony rather than a single animal. And it is a peculiarly clean place to watch it. There is no command centre, no manager, yet the colony as a whole spends its effort wisely against a world that keeps shifting, which flowers are worth visiting, how reliable they are, how much the hive still needs. Order without anyone in charge has to come from somewhere, and it comes from information flowing constantly between the members. The foragers are, in effect, energy-gathering machines that happen to live in a group, and they go about their business with no idea they are being watched, which lets me read that flow of information cleanly, by gentle means, without disturbing the very thing I am trying to see.
Some of that information relies on the several dances that advertise resource opportunities. But much of it travels by a quieter and older route, in mouthfuls of nectar passed from bee to bee. And it is there that I spent a great deal of my years with these insects. A single mouth-to-mouth pass is enough for a bee to learn a flower’s scent, so that a bee who never leaves the hive can come to know a bloom she has never seen. Bees beg quick samples from one another not for food but for news, and they do it most when the world outside is confusing. From the give and take of these small exchanges a colony works out how well it is doing and how hard to push, a kind of collective book-keeping that no single bee could perform alone. There is something humbling in it for us, who tend to assume that good collective sense needs someone in charge to hold the whole picture. The hive holds nothing anywhere. And manages all the same.
Because I take this to be one idea and not several, I let the animals teach one another. What the bees showed me about watching a free creature and reading its choices I carried straight into work with mice, where I found something I had not expected. That meeting the harder version of a task first makes the later learning faster rather than slower, so that early difficulty turns out to be a gift. And with a maze I designed to ask how a mouse finds its way in the dark, my colleagues and I helped show that a particular group of cells keeps a running tally of where the animal is as it moves, the quiet machinery behind a kind of navigation that a great many animals share, ourselves included.
The fish, the bees and the mice are where I have looked so far, but they are cases, not the case. The same question now takes me to other animals and other ways of being in the world. How an otter learns. What the first cries and sound signatures of a newborn puppy can tell us. What an elephant’s behaviour reveals about how well it is faring. How a lizard chooses where to live. And, in time, to the one creature that asks the question of itself. Each new creature is a fresh test of the same idea, and the further apart the animals, the more it is worth knowing whether the idea still holds.
Underneath all of this runs a question I keep returning to in another key, in the history and philosophy of my own science rather than in the laboratory. How did we come to think about behaviour the way we do, and what do we lose when we treat it as a mere surface to be peeled back on the way to something supposedly more real? Looking at how scientists have thought about behaviour from Darwin’s day to our own, I have argued that behaviour is not the rough outer layer we scrape past to reach the mechanisms beneath. It is the thing that makes those mechanisms mean anything at all. That conviction, that a living creature makes sense only whole, is the thread that ties it all together.